3 ms·

> How many things were discussed on rationalist websites that people were sure were going to be yuge, petered out, and were forgotten? This is addressed in the

> How many things were discussed on rationalist websites that people were sure were going to be yuge, petered out, and were forgotten? This is addressed in the article. The potential upside with Bitcoin was enormous, and so many people had predicted it amongst the rationalist community, that it made sense to make a tiny bet on it. The fact that other tiny bets might not have paid out doesn't really matter.

NoGravitas 9y ago
The problem with huge potential upside arguments is that they are equivalent to Pascal's wager, which pretty much no one today takes seriously. And, if you accept them, you have to also accept huge potential downside arguments, which (along with accepting some other dubious premises that are popular in the "rationalist" community) lead you to Roko's Basilisk.
- Bartweiss 9y ago
  > huge potential upside arguments... are equivalent to Pascal's wager I see this a lot, and I continue to disagree with it. Bitcoin was comparable to long-odds betting or penny stocks. $10,000/btc is a large number, but it's completely tractable. The risks of Bitcoin were a high chance of failure and an unbounded context where calculating odds was harder than, say, making long-odds sports books. Pascal's wager (and in rationalist terms "Pascal's mugging") is about generating a number so large it can't be reasoned with. More specifically, about arbitrarily increasing value until something beats any other consideration. Heaven and hell are infinites, duplicate simulations of a mind are unbounded, human extinction 'kills' an arbitrary number of future humans. And so you start getting nonsense results where risks are literally incomparable. If someone in 2009 told you 1 BTC was going to be worth $10,000, you'd have said that sounds very unlikely. If they told you it would be worth $10,000,000, you'd have noticed that this would make the value of BTC comparable to the gross output of the entire planet, and declared that no, this was impossible. It's not Pascal's wager if you can slap an upper bound on it and start doing meaningful odds calculations. (Roko's Basilisk is such a case, but I should reiterate that it was written to display why such claims don't make sense.)

NoGravitas 9y ago

The problem with huge potential upside arguments is that they are equivalent to Pascal's wager, which pretty much no one today takes seriously. And, if you accept them, you have to also accept huge potential downside arguments, which (along with accepting some other dubious premises that are popular in the "rationalist" community) lead you to Roko's Basilisk.

Bartweiss 9y ago
> huge potential upside arguments... are equivalent to Pascal's wager I see this a lot, and I continue to disagree with it. Bitcoin was comparable to long-odds betting or penny stocks. $10,000/btc is a large number, but it's completely tractable. The risks of Bitcoin were a high chance of failure and an unbounded context where calculating odds was harder than, say, making long-odds sports books. Pascal's wager (and in rationalist terms "Pascal's mugging") is about generating a number so large it can't be reasoned with. More specifically, about arbitrarily increasing value until something beats any other consideration. Heaven and hell are infinites, duplicate simulations of a mind are unbounded, human extinction 'kills' an arbitrary number of future humans. And so you start getting nonsense results where risks are literally incomparable. If someone in 2009 told you 1 BTC was going to be worth $10,000, you'd have said that sounds very unlikely. If they told you it would be worth $10,000,000, you'd have noticed that this would make the value of BTC comparable to the gross output of the entire planet, and declared that no, this was impossible. It's not Pascal's wager if you can slap an upper bound on it and start doing meaningful odds calculations. (Roko's Basilisk is such a case, but I should reiterate that it was written to display why such claims don't make sense.)